Steles of the Sky (38 page)

“And out of fear we might take it away from him,” Saadet sniped.

Al-Sepehr leaned slightly, touching one shoulder to the chair’s backrest. He did not seem at ease. “Love is based in fear,” he said complacently. “Fear of loss, or fear of pain. Let all love us, then, and hope we do not take from them what our strength would make easy.”

Our trickery, you mean.
But Saadet held her tongue on this topic, and only nodded. She had other subjects to broach while they were alone.

“We cannot hold Qersnyk,” she said.

“We do not have to.”

She blinked. “It is my … my son’s life if we do not.”

“Fear not for your … son.”

“You have not asked to hold him.”

Al-Sepehr’s face twisted in a disdainful grimace, but he smoothed it quickly.

“He is your grandson, after a fashion. Will you not give him your blessing, as al-Sepehr?”

He folded his arms. She was not sure he knew he’d done it. “You must not fear, Saadet. My …
your
advisors think that if anything his … condition will rally more Qersnyk to us. Paian tells me that a shaman-rememberer to the north, beyond the range of this storm and beyond the range of the Rahazeen sky, has seen his moon in the sky. He is a true heir to the Khaganate. And other messengers tell me that your son’s rival is attended by portents of ill omen—a ghost-colored colt, apparently, which these barbarians interpret as evidence of divine wrath.”

“Esen tells me another skinless corpse was discovered, frozen in a drift, within the walls of Qarash.”

“This is so,” al-Sepehr said complacently. He patted her arm. “You need not worry yourself about it. All will be well—”

She lowered her voice. She whispered harshly, “If anything can unite our enemies against us, it is the specter of Sepehr’s return!”

He stood. He patted her shoulder, still leaning awkwardly away. He said, “Does it matter if they unite against us, if our founder
does
return? If he returns, I should say, with the same power of belief behind him as the Scholar-God? As the Mother Dragon? As the primitive sky idol of these fetishistic barbarians?”

Involuntarily, she felt her arm tightening around Tsaagan Buqa. Her other hand rose to make a fist and press against her breastbone. “You believe this can work?”

“How are gods born?” al-Sepehr said. “They are born out of belief. Why should our prophet enjoy less status than some lightskirt wench renowned for her necklaces?”

Saadet felt her lips numb. She knew the strangeness in her head for shock, and blood loss, and exhaustion. Still, al-Sepehr’s gaze bored into her, and she knew what was expected. “For the Nameless,” she managed.

He smiled with a tutor’s pride. “For the world.”

*   *   *

Samarkar had experienced winters as mild as this one before, but not since she was married to a prince in Song. Temur said he had known one or two the same, all here among the sheltering limestone towers of Song. Early on in the season, a steady trickle of Qersnyk—unattached men, and a few clans and families—had arrived to muster to Temur’s banner. They were mostly better off than the refugees that already populated the valley, and Samarkar was kept busy negotiating the conflicts that inevitably arose between them, and between the Qersnyk and the Rasani, and between the Qersnyk, the Rasani, and the local farmers and peasantry who farmed the hills above Dragon Lake.

It surprised Samarkar how swiftly life in the encampment assumed a rhythm. The local residents, after the first nervous delegation, seemed to accept the army camped on the other side of the lake as business as usual. Temur and Samarkar made every attempt to see to it that they were not harassed. Of course, there were incidents … but this was one case where the dearth of young men in Re Temur Khagan’s army proved an advantage.

It remained a challenge to keep everyone fed. Rations were tight—but the proximity of the farms and town meant there
was
trade, and the lake was full of fish. Temur’s people got thin, to be sure, and more than one old mare past working found her way, regretfully, into a stew pot.

In the gaps between snows, retainers appeared to declare their loyalty to Temur—whole clans with children and carts in tow; lone men riding one mare and leading another as the sum total of their worldly wealth. They came, and kept coming. Some of them, Temur greeted by name. Some, he welcomed only guardedly.

The most surprising—and one of the most welcome—was Temur’s cousin Re Chagatai, at the head of fifty well-armed and mounted men: survivors of Temur’s brother’s ill-fated army and the battle of Qarash where Temur himself had nearly died. Chagatai favored his mother Nilufer, tall and straight-spined with an imperious expression and features that were a blend of West and East. He was a dour-seeming man, face lined with worry—or perhaps it was just the exhaustion of travel.

Most surprising of all, he brought with him a great steppe eagle, which he presented to Temur with some ceremony when he was brought to Temur’s white-house. Samarkar stood beside and a little behind Temur Khagan, hands folded in the warmth of her sleeves, and watched as the hooded bird was paraded past on a perch carried by two skinny boys. Samarkar smiled at Chagatai’s concealed pleasure, evidenced only by a flicker in his frown, when Temur conveyed Nilufer’s regards to him—but that didn’t change the fact that all this ceremony left her with a combination of nostalgia and unease. She wished she were in a room somewhere with her books, and Temur to look forward to over dinner.

But it seemed that there was no escaping a life of politics for this once-princess. The world knew what she was good at, whether she loved it or not, and brought it to her door.

Eventually, the trickle of new arrivals became a drip, and the drip died out entirely as winter hardened over the land. It was not a bad winter, not by steppe standards and not by Rasani ones—there was forage for the beasts, and hay to be traded for—but it was bad enough. Whenever they sent scouts out of the protected bowl of the valley surrounding Dragon Lake, those riders returned with tales of snow drifted impassably high, even for the horses, and the roar of winds bitter enough to stun mount as well as man.

Samarkar and Temur passed their time with making the acquaintance of their new people, Rasan as well as Qersnyk, and watching Afrit grow with a speed that caused even more mutters.

By midwinter he was taller than a yearling, and starting to put on muscle around his haunches, shoulders, and neck. Though he stayed preternaturally slender, even gaunt, he grew hard. The glistening color of his coat, brighter and slightly more golden than the drifts of snow he played in, gleamed in the winter sun. He was so pale that the whiteness of his stockings and blaze was only readily visible when the light struck him just so.

Samarkar grew to understand and accept what Temur had already known; this was no natural foal. He was a messenger, something sent. The only question was what message his existence was intended to convey. And who precisely had delivered it.

The Qersnyk wouldn’t tend the mare and the unlucky colt, so Samarkar took care of it when Temur was otherwise engaged. Which was rarely: He made time for Bansh and Afrit no matter how busy he was with the chafing rituals of his new status. He did not mind the hunts—which were nearly the only time they saw Hrahima, these days—and Bansh seemed to glory in her fine new saddle and the leopardskin trappings that glowed black and gold against her radiant liver-bay coat. Temur had caused a chamfron of gilded steel and cabochon rubies to be made, to protect her face in battle, but the armor was not yet ready; she made do with less regal furniture for now.

Temur was less thrilled with the trappings of
his
office, the elaborate clothing and the rituals. Samarkar sensed his frustration, but she counseled him to tolerate it. To look a Khagan, so he would not be mistaken for anything else.

At least he finally had a bow made to fit him, replacing—half-reluctantly—the one he had scavenged from the battlefield at Qarash, which had saved their lives so often on the road. That one hung in a place of honor over the household altar, where Samarkar and Temur mingled icons to the Eternal Sky, Mother Night, and Samarkar’s more favored among the Six Thousand Small Gods and the Six Hundred Great Gods of Rasa—the Mother Dragon and all her manifold children.

Samarkar even had a new coat or two—less elaborate than the ones she had brought from Rasa, but also less threadbare. Material goods were not the issue, though arms and armament were scarce. There were barely enough mares to keep them all in airag, and not a lot of that for anyone. Samarkar knew that Temur worried about horses; about getting
enough
horses. And about getting the
right
horses to fulfill his pledge to assemble a Sacred Herd.

Temur’s horses—Bansh and Afrit, Jerboa, and the other mares who were slowly beginning to be tithed to the Khagan—lived in a corral near the edge of the encampment, not far from the sinkhole they had skirted on the way in. The Qersnyk had built an offering pile nearby, for devotions to the Eternal Sky. It looked to the uneducated eye like a heap of rubble wound through with scraps of blue cloth, but Samarkar had seen Jurchadai and the other shaman-rememberers riding circles around it at sunset and sunrise. She noticed because Samarkar often accompanied Temur out to the corral when he tended Bansh and Afrit, to see how Temur handled the horses.

And, if she admitted it to herself, to spend time with only Temur and the horses.

*   *   *

The dark wings of a lazy vulture floated high in the sky on a crisp still day. Samarkar leaned against the makeshift gate of the makeshift paddock and said to Temur, beside her, “What if you sold him?”

Temur twisted his head—she was standing on the side that it was easier for him to turn to—and frowned. “We don’t sell horses.”

“I know,” she said. “But you could finance a lot of war with that one pony. And he could go to someone who wouldn’t have to navigate superstitions about his color.” She gestured to where the creamy-gold colt stood beside his mother, his chin resting on her withers. “Or how fast he’s growing.”

“Hmph.” Temur’s lips scrunched together in a way that said he was thinking. “I’ve already proclaimed my reign as belonging to the Ghost Stud. Even if I didn’t need him for my Sacred Herd, that would be a problem. Barring that, I could send him as a friendship gift to some Song prince, but the politics of which one would be awkward. That at least wouldn’t alienate my people by the break in tradition.”

She found herself looking at him with more respect than she had expected and felt bad about it. “Smart.”

He shrugged. “I do watch, you know.”

“Why is ghost-sorrel an unlucky color?”

He nibbled on the seam of his glove because he could not reach the fingernail. “I never thought about it.”

The curiosity that had led her to the Wizard’s Citadel stirred. “Think now.”

“All the palest colors are unlucky. There is milk-white, which is the white that can produce other colors. And snow-white, which is the white that can produce spotted foals. They’re a little unlucky, but it can be averted with charms and paint. And there is ghost-cream, ghost-sorrel, and ghost-bay, which are.…” He shrugged, helplessly. “All other things being equal, a black horse bred to a ghost horse produces a smoke-colored horse. A bay horse bred to a ghost horse produces a phantom, a golden horse with a black mane. A chestnut horse bred to a ghost horse produces the color called pearl, a golden horse with a cream-colored mane. But the foal of two ghost horses is always ghost, and the foal of, say, a pearl horse and a smoke horse
might
be ghost. Or it might be a strong color. They’re not unlucky in themselves. Just not bred to other horses that can produce ghosts.”

“You’re saying it might be unlucky because it … pulls the color out of the foal?”

The sweet scent of burning yak dung wafted over them as the wind shifted: someone’s hearth. He shook his head. “Some white foals, and some ghost foals, are born dead. Or too weak to stand. Or—worst—born strong, and waste away. And some white mares cannot be got in foal.”

“You said that Afrit was impossible.”

He nodded. “Bansh could produce a pearl foal, or a phantom-colored foal, if bred to a stallion who could influence her thus. She might produce a black foal. Possibly a chestnut, though some bay mares never do. But she would have to be phantom-colored herself, and bred to a phantom or pearl stud, to produce a ghost-sorrel colt.”

“It’s complicated,” she said. “Your horse-breeding is a kind of wizardry of its own.”

He rubbed his chin with his palm and changed the subject. “I miss Hsiung.”

Samarkar breathed deep. “He will be along with the thaw,” she said, and tried to believe it.

He might have said more, or he might have turned away and looked elsewhere, but a big flutter of feathers drew their attention. Samarkar ducked reflexively and summoned light. Temur came close to doing the former, even though the beat of wings was nothing at all like the enormous storm of wind and thunder of pinions that surrounded the descent of the Rukh.

Instead, a peacock sailed low across the paddock fences, though not close enough to the mares to spook them. Afrit, with all the high spirits of any colt, kicked up his heels and followed, kicking his way through the drifts of snow. The peacock even was more striking than the general run of his species—snow white, with eyes like split coal, he was whiter by a great deal than Afrit or the trampled snow.

The bird lighted in an overhanging tree. Samarkar pointed with her chin, Qersnyk style. They were rubbing off on her. “Is that an omen too?”

“It startled me,” Temur said. “I’ve never seen one that color before.”

“Not even here?”

“Especially not here, I’d say.”

The peacock screamed like a murdered child and Samarkar shuddered. She and Temur leaned their shoulders together. Samarkar broke the companionable silence first. “You think al-Sepehr will wait for a nice convenient war in spring?”

“I don’t know,” Temur said.

“He could just send the Rukh after us.”